Posts Tagged ‘Marketing Book Reviews’

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I haven’t much enjoyed my subscription to e-consultancy thus far. Most of the documents I’ve reviewed were not quite what I was expecting or useless (at least to me). The Online Retail 2006 guide is a clear exception. (To be fair, I’ve only read a small handful of the documents available, and I do plan on reading more.) Unfortunately I can’t find a link to this document on their website, which means my glowing review will lead to disappointment for anyone trying to find it. They do also offer a 2007 Checkout Special but I haven’t looked at it to see if it’s an updated version of the 2006.

This 85 page download first takes you through the mind of the customer, how they make their purchase decisions and then provides example after example of both good and bad implementation of shopper usability issues. More than any other book or PDF I’ve read this year, I found myself taking a considerable amount of notes, both for me, our team and for updates on our SEM processes.

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A few weeks back Michelle found a fun little document by Bill Gammel that outlines 7 marketing lessons from the show Seinfeld. I can probably count the number of full Seinfeld episodes I’ve seen on one hand. (That’s all about to change as I was just gifted with the entire series on DVD). But that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the importance that this show has had on our pop-culture.

In fact Seinfeld was probably the most important pop-culture show of all time, if one can attach the word importance to pop-culture. Not only did the show make fun of current pop culture idiosyncrasies, but it brought out into the open many of the hidden things that many of us didn’t realize that others did or thought right along with us. While Seinfeld made us laugh at these pop culture references it also created many more pop culture references that we still use today.

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Authors: Malcolm Gladwell
Hardcover: 320 pages
Cost: $10.87
Published: January, 2005

Blink is a book about the human brain. While it helps the reader better understand how the human brain works, don’t expect to be able to use that understanding to your advantage. In fact, while the book provides a fascinating discovery of how the human brain “thin slices” both people and events, the main takeaway from this is that thin slicing is either accurate or it’s not.

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Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules
Authors: Mike Moran
Hardcover: 408 pages
Cost: $16.49
Published: October, 2007

I absolutely love Mike Moran’s take on Internet marketing. Do It Wrong Quickly is not about how to do Internet marketing wrong, it’s about how to not get caught up in having to do it right so that you’ll do something now. Doing something wrong is far better than doing nothing right. Doing something wrong quickly is far better than doing something right slowly. The bottom line is that you simply need to do something.

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I think I would have titled SEOmoz’s Social Media Optimization Strategies differently. It’s more of a detailed look at the social media landscape and analysis of the major social media players. As it turns out, it’s a fantastic document that provides insights that you usually don’t get in the typical “strategies” type information.

Rand’s team does an excellent job of providing rundown of MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Squidoo, Reddit, Yahoo! Answers, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and LinkedIn. They show you how to create an account on each and the right and wrong ways to get involved in the community. They share strategies that work and don’t work on each, pitfalls to be aware of, and how best to build an active profile that is likely to get attention.

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Brian Clark (copyblogger) has just released a quick 22-page download (or audio recording) titled, Teaching Sells: Forget everything you know about making money online… and start making some. In this report Brian teases us with the concept of making money through distribution of content. Forget giving reports away for free and start selling it! (Is it just me that finds it ironic that a report about not giving away content for free was free?)

Brian explains that people are still willing to pay for information that has a higher perceived value. Making money online is as simple as finding the content people are willing to pay for and making it available to a larger audience.

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The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class
Authors: Keith Cameron Smith
Hardcover: 128 pages
Cost: $10.17
Published: August, 2007

You’ll not find a more simplified, boiled down analysis of what separates the rich from, well, everybody else. No, this isn’t a book talking about how rich people are a bunch of greedy SOB’s. Nor is it talking about some get-rich-quick scheme or how you can make millions of dollars overnight. While the book may be short, it’s quite simple in its approach answering the question, why do some people have more money than others?

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Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO
Authors: Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie
Paperback: 360 pages
Cost: $26.39
Published: April 2007

Running a successful search engine optimization firm means that I have to have a solid understanding in numerous coding strategies that can play a role in an SEO campaign. I’m not a programmer, and don’t know a lick about PHP, but I also knew that pSEOwPHP would be a valuable book worth reading. I was right.

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A lot of great info is packed into the 26-page Social Media Daily. The author, Michelle MacPhearson, provides the reader with a series of checklists and links to guide you through any social media campaign.

The free e-book sports over 300 links to your favorite social media sites, plus a couple of hundred more you’ve probably never even heard of. And that is what brings the most value to Social Media Daily. Michelle has basically done the legwork for you, having found all the sites relevant to any particular type social media campaign.

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Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Authors: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Hardcover: 320 pages
Cost: $16.77
Published: 2006

So I didn’t read the revised and expanded version (which adds about another 100 pages) but I still found Freakonomics immensely interesting and entertaining. This is another one of those books that’s hard to categorize. It’s neither a personal development book nor a business book. It’s more thought provoking than anything, perhaps causing a change in thought process that can be used in both life and in business.

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